The most influential figure in the history of the ‘New American Cinema’ discusses his past, present and ongoing projects. The interview concludes with Mekas’ strikingly precise and detailed evocation of the historical controversy surrounding Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures.

Stan Brakhage didn’t invent the avant-garde cinema. But he certainly reinvented it. Under his tutelage, it finally became a fine art. Joseph Schumpeter would have called it “creative destruction”, a new...

If reporters write the first draft of history, critics write the second. And like reporters, critics have one signal advantage over historians and theorists: they see the entire field, rather than what gets...

(London: Wallflower Press, 2002) The non-obviousness requirement was once the bête noire of patent law. Many a brilliant invention looks quite obvious once described. But after the patent office abandoned...

Ever since 1891, when Thomas Alva Edison – the quintessential American – became the inventor of the motion picture rather than his brilliant English employee, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, the British...